Buzz Newsroom - a collaborative news blog

[Mark Rock]

This is interesting - Buzznewsroom.com

It's a collaborative news blog based on the Wordpress platform. As they describe it:

"What if Huffington Post or the Drudge Report were a collaborative news blog? Well, that’s us, Buzz Newsroom; reporting what the Internet is buzzing about. Real people pick related stories, a news mashup."

It's interesting in a couple of ways. Firstly it echos an approach I wrote about here on 38minutes which argued in favour of using existing open source platforms and some of our audio/video software products to create ultra local news services. Buzznewsroom seems to be based on Wordpress MU since anyone can become a contributor. But the interesting editorial slant is that, as a contributor you can author posts but not publish them. Buzz Newsroom editors will review the entries and choose to publish them. Once you become a trusted contributor, your status may be upgraded to “author,” which means you can publish directly.

The other nice touch is that is uses FaceBook Connect, which is the easy way to use your Facebook login details on other sites. That makes it easy to get buy in from local communities.

Is there a model here for local news whereby a curator journalist starts the site up and activates the local community into becoming blogging journalists?.